Who needs a thesis when your paintings are as beautiful as David Hockney's?
This exhibition can be enjoyed in one of two ways: the official and the unofficial. Its subject is David Hockney's take on how artists go about making pictures – in particular, his belief that technology has assisted countless figures ever since the Renaissance.
He himself has always embraced technology, and the show includes some of his well-known experiments with the Polaroid camera and iPad. Also on view are optical devices such as a camera obscura and a camera lucida, which he insists helped Old Masters from Velázquez to Vermeer paint so accurately.
The exhibition is being held chiefly at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, with 60 Hockneys sprinkled through the rooms of its permanent collection. (A few of his works are also on show at the Heong Gallery, in Downing College, nearby.)
Hockney’s theory about the historic use of optical aids is much disputed, with critics saying it detracts from the notion of artistic genius. Visitors are invited to assess its merits while looking at canvases such as Poussin’s Extreme Unction (1638-40), which depicts the anointment of a dying soldier. (The Frenchman purportedly painted it after making a 3D version of the scene out of wax models, which he placed in a wooden box and viewed through a peep-hole).
I can’t help but feel, however, that theories about art are best left in books. In 2001, Hockney wrote an engaging and pertinent one himself, Secret Knowledge – on what he called “the lost techniques of the Old Masters”.
Which brings us to the second way to enjoy this show: the unofficial, and surely more fruitful, one. It is simply to appreciate Hockney’s art hanging beside that of his vaunted predecessors.
One pleasing juxtaposition is that of his California Bank (1964) with Gerrit Berckheyde’s The Town Hall of Amsterdam (1674). Both portray large urban buildings, but where the earlier painting offers a pristine view across the Dutch capital’s Dam Square, Hockney depicts a bank in the abstract form of a geometric grid. (He was responding to the clean lines of modernist architecture that he saw all around on his first trip to Los Angeles.)
The thing this show really hammers home is just how thoroughly connected to art history Hockney is. Though he has done it in innovative fashion, he has consistently tackled traditional genres: from landscape and still life to portraiture.
The artist isn’t part of the curatorial team. However, he has assisted in the planning of this show from the off – and also contributed a recent self-portrait. Painted in November 2021, it depicts him in a natty tweed suit, paintbrush in one hand, cigarette in the other.
Talking of curation, there’s a welcome playfulness to many of the juxtapositions. The Fitzwilliam has a celebrated gallery of 17th- and 18th-Century flower paintings, for example, and Hockney’s Beach Umbrella (1974) is exhibited among them. Multi-coloured and fluttering gently in the wind, the titular umbrella rather resembles a floral bouquet. It’s a high point in what is, overall, a blooming good show.
From Mar 15 to Aug 29; fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk 01223 332 900; dow.cam.ac.uk 01223 334 800; free entry